I Typically Ran Away From Fights with My Wife

Conflict-avoidant tendencies like mine (and those shared by millions of others) often lead to a relationship pattern almost certain to end marriage or a long-term partnership.

Image/Francisco Moreno, courtesy of Anchor Wellness.

My whole body would tense up and everything would feel bad. Here we go again.

Science teaches us this feeling comes from our adrenal glands flooding our body with stress hormones. Adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline junkies get off on some component of this feeling. But probably not when they’re fighting childlike urges to scream or fight or run or die, because when you’re looking at your spouse or romantic partner who you love intensely, and interacting with them feels worse than interacting with literally every other human on the planet, you kind of want to die, just to get it over with.

Or maybe that’s just me. I don’t know if my ex-wife and I fought often, because I don’t know how to measure that. Most of us don’t discuss these things at parties and social gatherings. But I do know that the longer we were together, the more easily we slipped into The Same Fight, and the more intensely I wanted to run away.

I wanted to run away because I knew from previous experience that it was unlikely that continuing the conversation (in the manner in which we habitually conducted ourselves) would result in anything positive. I always thought agreeing to disagree was the most pragmatic solution. She did not. That made no sense to me then. It seemed like she wanted to fight. It makes complete sense to me now—nothing ever heals without repair, and I was always so busy running away, that things rarely got repaired.

While my affinity for escapism was largely a selfish exercise, mixed into all of this was the perpetual shame and anger and sadness from the constant feeling that I was somehow failing her again.

That I was a perpetual disappointment.

That after several years together, she had gone from pursuing me in college even though she could have had most any guy she wanted (she’s significantly more attractive than I am) and pleading with me about my commitment issues in my early twenties, to standing in the kitchen seemingly disgusted and betrayed by me, even though it seemed as if she was the one always stirring up trouble. After all, zero other people ever say things like this to me. I get along with everybody but her. Clearly, she’s the one with the problem.

Once I’d had enough of her digging up the same tired old arguments over and over again, I’d walk away to cool off. To self-soothe. To feel like myself again.

It didn’t involve any self-reflection. It didn’t involve any personal growth. It involved numbing and/or distracting myself with something interesting or feel-good. A movie. A video game. A drink. A sporting event. A poker table. A hangout with a friend.

Everything will be better tomorrow, I’d think. Maybe she’ll come around after a good night’s sleep.

…

More than 90 percent of romantic couples argue.

That’s according to a few random internet websites which may or may not be reputable, but I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Arguing in relationships is both normal and healthy, they say.

Normal, for sure. Or maybe the better word is “typical,” or “common.” The existence of conflict does not necessarily indicate a relationship is dysfunctional.

But, healthy? I’m a word guy. Whether frequent arguments in a relationship are healthy is a matter of context and semantics.

It turns out that “Never go to bed angry!” actually contains a lot of wisdom, despite me making fun of it and dismissing it in my book as “fortune cookie marriage advice.” What it fails to explain is that most of us must do a lot of patient and uncomfortable emotional work to learn how to understand WHY the people we love are angry. “Never go to bed angry!” is only useful if we can dissipate the anger.

And it’s very difficult to relieve others of anger when we don’t actually understand their problem.

If two partners are vigilant about relationship repair—meaning whenever conflict arises, both people invest in understanding the other’s perspective or pain and can be trusted to help ease any suffering between one another (even if the suffering seems minor)—then every time they have a little dustup, they both prove to one another their love and trustworthiness. Over and over again.

Nothing strengthens relationships quite like a consistent demonstration of trust-reinforcing behavior.

Which brings us to what I wanted to focus on here: The frequently observed tendency of one partner in a relationship (quite often the man in a male-female relationship) to remove themselves from uncomfortable situations with the other partner. Doing so essentially excuses them to go do whatever helps them to feel better while effectively abandoning the other partner to stew in the anger and sadness and confusion of not being listened to or understood; seemingly not important enough to the other person to be shown even a faint signal of love or respect.

This is one of the most subtle and important ideas in marriage or romantic relationships.

And young people—most often men, in my experience—are NOT taught about what actually is happening during this all-too-common toxic relationship pattern.

No matter how well intentioned and committed the runaway partner might be to the relationship, something very painful and trust destroying is happening inside the mind and heart of the person left holding the relationship bag.

…

I figured she’d come around. She always had before. A day or two goes by, and it’s like nothing had ever happened. (Read the following in the most comically uneducated voice you can imagine: She’s probably just on her period again! Women, amiright?! LOL!!!!11!!!1!!!)

Even without the brainless, immature sexism mixed into this casserole, this is how your marriage ends.

I can tell you dozens of reasons why walking away from another fight in the kitchen wasn’t bad. How it wasn’t the wrong thing to do. How the idea of HER hurting after SHE found another reason to complain about me and starting a fight with me was laughable.

They’ll make sense to many of you. And to those with the same fight-or-flight tendencies, they’ll ring true.

But just as there are people in this world who can get stung by a bee and have little more than an itchy red spot to show for it, while others may die from that same sting, so too will two people in a relationship experience identical moments in radically different ways.

And humans are exceptional at not seeing, or not understanding, or altogether ignoring this idea when someone else’s experiences appear bizarrely divergent and foreign from our own.

This is why there are wars.

This is why opposing cultural and political factions scream at each other.

This is why there is racism and sexism and bigotry.

And, this is why we destroy the people we love—slowly. Why we hurt them over and over and over again, the entire time believing they’re simply interpreting us wrong, and if they’d only learn how to think and feel the way we do, everything would be okay.

…

While everything I used to think and feel was valid, there was another person involved. And just because I didn’t know how to be deathly afraid of bee stings (because a bee sting won’t kill me), that fact has never negated the reality that other real-life people out there DO have to be wary and vigilant about the dangers of a bee sting.

My ex-wife was hurt. Something was wrong. She was trying her best to make me aware of this thing that was wrong. She wanted to be married. She wanted security in her life and marriage. She wanted to know that everything was going to be okay.

But every time she tried to recruit me to help reconcile whatever was wrong—whatever was causing pain—I would often dismiss it. Being afraid of bee stings is for children! It doesn’t hurt THAT bad. Calm down.

Every time my frustration reached the tipping point, I would run away to go do whatever felt better to me. And in doing so, I left my wife alone to feel angry, to feel sad, to feel betrayed, to feel neglected. To be abandoned.

While I was busy not thinking about anything, waiting for my adrenaline and cortisol to calm down, my wife was somewhere else in the house recognizing the never-ending pattern that poisons relationships like an IV drip.

“When Matt feels bad about something, Matt’s feelings are very important to him. You can tell. He always does whatever he wants or needs in order to feel better. But whenever I feel bad about something, Matt rarely does anything I want or need in order for me to feel better. Because he doesn’t care about anyone but himself. No matter what he says, this is more evidence that he doesn’t actually care about me.”

…

My ex-wife’s experience was pretty consistent during our disagreements. I was typically advocating for my position and trying to explain why what she thought or felt had less merit than whatever I was thinking or feeling.

And then, once we were both upset enough, I would run away to do whatever selfish thing I wanted, and I would leave her alone with all of the painful evidence she would need to determine whether we could have a future together.

Once I’d exhausted the trust between us, we were done.

…

Showing up for someone else is about learning how to sit in discomfort with them. Whether their mom is sick, whether their dog just died, whether they had a bad day at work, or whether something you did with the best of intentions resulted in a painful or otherwise negative experience for them.

Who can we trust? Who can we always feel safe with? Who are the people we can confidently say care about us?

The people who are there in good times and in bad.

I didn’t know how to see it when I was married. And just maybe, you or someone you know isn’t so great at seeing it either.

But when the times were bad, my default setting was (and maybe still is) to escape so that I would feel better. It was NOT to speak and act in a manner designed to relieve the pain for someone else—certainly not when that person was upset with me about something I didn’t agree with.

But THAT is how trust is built.

THAT is how after years and years and years, love remains.

We don’t let our own experiences blind us to the sometimes totally diverse experiences of someone else. And then instead of prioritizing our own comfort, we choose to invest our energy in prioritizing the other person’s. To demonstrate that we value relieving their pain just as much as we value it for ourselves. Two people consistently doing that for one another changes everything.

That’s how relationship disharmony gets repaired and morphs back to harmony.

That’s how pain is relieved (and prevented).

That’s how wounds heal.

It was hard for me to listen to my wife tell me how my words and actions were hurting her. I was really uncomfortable. I found it all very frustrating and inconvenient.

One wonders how hard it was for my wife to hear and feel: I don’t love you as much as I love me. I don’t care about your pain, because I’m too busy trying to soothe my own. Whenever we have competing interests, you can count on me to always choose me over you. I’m leaving now. I don’t like this. I’ll come back and talk to you again whenever I feel better.

More than ten years after my divorce. One wonders.

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.